Over the past month my life seems to have been filled with George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. It all started when I was in a bookshop in the Science Fiction section (with all the cool kids) and I noticed that the top five bestsellers in scifi were all from Martin’s A Song of…
The German satellite ROSAT is due to hit the planet this weekend. Should you worry? According to the German Aerospace Agency DLR, the odds are 1 in 2000 that it will hit someone. Let’s put that in perspective. Have you ever bought a Lotto ticket? The odds in the UK of you winning are 1 in 14,000,000. So it’s 4,375 times more likely that the satellite will squish someone than you are to win the lottery. If the pieces rain down on a city, entire buildings could be smashed with more than one person dying.
I love books. I read about a book a week – that’s not a boast, it is a sad lament on how boring my job can be. They are marvelous things that make your house look cool and make you look smart. Even if they are just Clive Cussler or Dan Brown novels. (Well maybe,…
Astronomers seemingly have the coolest job ever. They get to gaze into the depths of space at stars and black holes and try to find life bearing planets and all other manner of inspiring stuff. It’s just a shame they are such an unimaginative bunch. This picture is of a galaxy 13 billion light years away….
An entire week ago, I wrote how warm and pleasant England was. It’s now back to its standard grey drizzle. Ahh, normality. In fact, two days after the warmest October day ever, it snowed in Scotland. Again, normality. Apparently, though, this winter is going to be one of the coldest winters ever. From November onwards, for months…
The weather here in London is currently sunny, warm and pleasant. That’s an unlikely thing to write at the best of times, but it’s even more mental in October. The last week has been in the high 20s Celsius with the last three days hitting 29C every day. It was 22C in Algeria for comparison and Algeria…
I know I have only been an adrenaline-fuelled, risk-it-all, balls-to-the-wall, living-on-the-edge stocktrader for about four months but I have decided to ostracize myself already by slagging of other traders. That’s just the way I roll. I take no prisoners these days. It gives me the edge. It’s where I have to be. For some reason…
Like many poor worker drones, I have to commute to work. Also like the aforementioned proletarians I plug into an MP3 player to drown out the excuses constantly being announced by London Underground as to why half the transport network is currently broken. Judging by the tinny, unnessarily loud sounds coming from their headphones, everyone seems to…
Yesterday, Mrs Wordofward and myself were all cultural and went to the BBC Proms in the Park. It’s the world’s largest classical music festival and is now in its 117th year (although I’m pretty certain it wasn’t called ‘BBC’ proms a century ago). To my shame I had missd the previous 116 Proms so it was…
I read an alarming article the other day. According to a recent study by the University of Queensland, every hour spent watching TV reduces a viewer’s life expectancy by 22 minutes. I then read another comment in the paper that 6 hours of TV a day massively reduces lifespan. It’s possible that the latter read the…
I have been doing an absolute ton of work recently, which utterly blows. I’m a freelancer who is paid by the hour, so I shouldn’t really grumble about 70 hour weeks, but fuck it, I am. Yah boo sucks to toil. Take that ‘sense of purpose’. It could be worse I suppose. I could be…
Apparently there is going to be a scheme where people convicted of certain crimes, say looting or graffiti, are forced to work five days a week if they are unemployed. It will consist of four days of community service, cleaning stuff for example, and one day looking for work. I assume this means chain gangs…
Exciting news! Or just news. It depends on the sort of thing that excites you. I’m positively gripped. The Word of Ward and www.scifiward.com are now available on Amazon Kindle and it costs less than a pound (or a dollar) a month. Which is a pittance. This means that every time I make a new…
South Koreans are busy people but happen to be blessed by advanced technology. I say ‘blessed’, they just work hard at innovation and have created an infrastructure that encourages new technological development, but blessed is easier. Also, to be fair, the virtual supermarket in the video below could be done in Britain. Or anywhere that…
A load of twats in hats tried to burn London down. And because London leads the way, there were then riots all over England. It was like the film Rise of the Planet of the Apes out there – except that the apes in the movie are literate and you can understand their motives and…
New iPhone covers come with very weird fake hand attached.
When Perry Makepiece and Gail Perkins go on a tennis holiday to Antigua, they meet a Russian gangster type called Dima and his family. Dima wants to make a deal with the British Government and to do that he needs the holidaymakers to get in touch with the “right people”. Or spies to you and me….
Apparently we are already in the run up to Christmas. At least we are according to Harrods and Selfridges, who started selling Christmas tat on July 28th this year. I know the weather has been pretty crap, but this is taking it a bit far. As a general rule of thumb, I don’t think you should…
The last ever Space Shuttle, the Atlantis, touched down yesterday marking the end of the 30 year old NASA project. My initial thought was, ‘Well, that’s another giant leap backward for Mankind’ and felt vaguely depressed by direction humanity has decided to return to – inward looking, money-obsessed, war-mongering, looking after our own, seeing only the short term,…
Buy! Sell! Adrenaline! Men in ties stressing out! Brokers swilling champagne or chucking themselves out of skyscrapers! Yup, that’s my new life. Apart from pretty much everything I just mentioned. I have started trading – something I never thought I would do or even say. Why have I never traded before? I was always a…